The Fire Seekers

by Richard Farr

  Having admitted defeat on the cataloging, Bill is now saying Lorna’s all wrong about the site stratigraphy. Er, hello? Who is the archaeologist here?

  Deeply impressed. Never seen a human being drink this much coffee before.

  Most of the tablets are in Old Akkadian. We think this thing was written continuously from 2500 to around 1600 BCE.

  Every day I force him to answer at least one question about Akkadian grammar. I’m beginning to get the hang of the cuneiform writing system. Complicated as hell. Looks more like a carpet pattern than anything you could read. But it’s logical, and you know I have a soft spot for logical.

  Now he’s taken to sitting up all night, scribbling in longhand while having these long, angry arguments with himself out loud. Like a cute version of Gollum. Progress? Despair? Impending madness?

  I feel sorry for the Chens: dealing with him during a work binge is even worse than she makes it sound. At times like this he’s capable of neither small talk nor large talk, he’s demanding and rude, he doesn’t tell anyone anything. I saw it in Greece, when we found the three additional Disks. A kind of frenzy: bad enough when fueled by hope, worse when our discovery only made the Phaistos puzzle even more maddeningly intractable. But each of Morag’s messages brings a twinge of jealousy too, and I don’t even know whether it’s because she has abilities that make her close to him, or the other way around.

  I ask her how Jimmy and Lorna are taking it.

  I don’t think it’s any big surprise. Just ignoring it, getting on with their stuff. Measuring, surveying, dumping data into spreadsheets. What we archaeologists do.

  I tell her I don’t know why they put up with him.

  Because we adore him, D.

  No, M: Jimmy and Lorna admire him, love him even—as you love an annoying family member who has the redeeming quality of never being dull. It’s you who adores him. It’s you who wants to be him. Maybe, M, you should take a closer look at what happens when a brilliant person with loads of ideas and enthusiasm sprints into a brick wall.

  I don’t actually say any of this.

  Finally, just as we finish our long drive from Punta Arenas to the foot of the Torres del Paine, all eager for the climb, the patience of the Chens is rewarded. Morag again:

  Scene of triumph, D. Imagine this. Bill hasn’t smiled in days, but this afternoon he pops up in the middle of camp, scruffy as hell, eyes twinkling like a Christmas tree in a storm.

  Lorna: Is it good news then?

  Bill: Oh I think so.

  Lorna: What do we have then? Not just dates and names I hope.

  Bill: What we have, Lorna, is one of the most important archaeological discoveries of all time.

  And he hands her something that we, the archaeologists, completely missed. Something impossible, D. It’s a fragment only, curved at one side, looks like a chunk ripped off a pizza. But there’s no question at all. It’s part of a Disk.

  WTF?

  Excuse me, but W? T? F?

  Even coming from Morag, I don’t believe it. Even when I see she’s attached three photos, I don’t believe it. When Dad lets his university contacts know, they believe it even less—and yet they do believe, sort of, because there it is in front of their eyes, and a slice of pizza it’s not. They’re so shocked—gob-smacked, Lorna would say—that even though they can’t say anything coherent, they can’t resist making the whole thing public anyway. Suddenly everyone wants an interview. Dad, who loves the sound of his own voice around the dinner table but loves it a whole lot more on the idiot box, can’t resist.

  And thus, Boston.

  “So, Professor, correct me if I have this wrong, but I understood from our phone conversation that you have found the library at the Tower of Babel? And in this library you discovered”—he ruffles his notes—“an artifact that simply should not be there?”

  CHAPTER 4

  A BODY IS A BODY

  The rock punches Mom sideways into space, then her body drops like a sack, accelerating down into the gap between us. One outflung arm smacks so hard into my shoulder and neck that for a moment I think the impact has broken my collarbone.

  There are two metal cams in a thin crack just above Rosko—the last piece of safety she placed before that final, sprinting climb. When she has fallen another forty feet, and runs out of rope, they should stop her. But the fall is too long, the force too great: they rip out of the wall, one after the other, like corks from a bottle.

  I expect Rosko to scream, or cling to the rock. Nein!—the same futile response in every language, when death jumps up out of nowhere, and stares you in the face, and you hope to frighten it away. Perhaps there’s just no time to react, but it’s eerie, the way he says and does nothing. The rope falls over his right shoulder, sits there harmless for a split second, and then wrenches him backward. As he pivots sideways, feet still against the rock, I get a clear view of his face. He looks perfectly relaxed. And then I can’t see his face anymore, and he is falling past me too, headfirst.

  I’m last in line. I’ve been working my way along a row of narrow bumps—footholds seems like an exaggeration. As if from a great distance, I see Mom still falling, Rosko falling, and the rope arcing down beside me. Then the arc passes me, lengthens, and goes as tight as a violin string.

  I look down, straight past my left heel, just in time to see Rosko stopped, whiplashed backward, and slammed into the rock. He bounces off, twirls crazily for a few seconds like a plastic doll, then is picked up by the wind and smacked into the wall again.

  Just above me, the last anchor holds firm. And a vicious gust of air seems to come from above, hot, like opening the door to an oven, stinging my eyes.

  That’s what I remember, anyway. I don’t remember much, because I enter a sort of dream-state after that.

  I shout. I shout until I’m hoarse, but I can’t even tell if Rosko is alive. So instead I look up, again: hands up in front of my face, knuckles white around the rope, as if in prayer. My whole attention is focused on the small, spring-loaded metal device that’s wedged into the rock above me.

  It’s a standard offset cam, just like the ones that failed. A mass-produced chunk of basic climbing gear that sets you back seventy, eighty bucks at the climbing supply store. I look lovingly at each tiny detail of its construction, its shape, the slight texturing of the aluminum. Something in me wants to just stare and stare at it. As if maybe staring will hold it in place. It’s the only thing between me and a long vertical good-bye.

  I’m beginning to shake—shock wanting to take me over. So I tear my eyes away from the cam, try not to think, and start moving. Fast. It takes only a minute or two to get down to a position just above Rosko. He’s dangling at the top of a slight overhang, so the rock slopes outward below him and his body is resting against it. It’s obvious he has severe injuries: apart from anything else, his right leg is at an impossible angle.

  Working my way down a couple more feet, I look over the edge. Because of the overhang, Mom’s body is turning lazily in space, like a mobile above a baby’s crib. She’s three, four feet out from the wall. While I’m looking down at her, Rosko regains consciousness. Delirious with pain, he starts to utter a high, blood-freezing wail that sounds less like a human being asking for help than a horribly damaged animal asking to be put out of its misery.

  “Rosko? It’s OK. You’re OK. I’m going to move you in just a minute, OK? Just hang in there. Hang in there.”

  Doubt he even hears me—and anyway it’s for my benefit, not his. I’m trying to work something out. Should be able to make a series of loops, create a sort of sling, and slowly hoist him to a marginally safer place. OK, let’s try that.

  I tie it wrong, twice, before getting it right.

  Good. Progress. But the rope he’s on is bearing three hundred pounds—the weight of two bodies. And although I strain and strain, it’s impossible to shift him.

  Is there another way? Is there something I’ve missed?

  Think now.

  Th
ink.

  I must move him soon, in case I run out of strength or the last cam fails. I can’t move him without first moving Mom. But there’s no way to do that. So there is only one way to save him.

  “You’re doing good, OK? You’re doing fine. With you in a sec.” I curse when I hear how unconvincing I sound. Looking down, I hesitate.

  Surely, surely this can’t be right? There must be another way.

  But there is no other way.

  I am going to have to cut the rope.

  Then I hear her. I hear her voice.

  It doesn’t sound like her voice coming up from below, where her body is. It doesn’t sound like her voice inside my head. It’s not a voice from a dream, or a memory of the way she sounded, or a freak effect of the wind. No. It’s her voice. Right next to me. Speaking to me:

  Not complicated, this one, is it Daniel? The issue here is Rosko, who you can still save. A body is a body. Without consciousness, we are pieces of meat. Nothing to discuss.

  OK.

  A body is a body. Without consciousness—

  If this is a hallucination, it’s totally convincing and wonderfully comforting and terrifying, all at the same time. I stare in puzzled silence at the empty air next to me, where the words came from, repeating the sound of them over and over in my head, waiting for more. But there’s nothing. With an effort I tear myself away, steel myself, shift down another foot, reach down with the knife.

  I try to slice through the rope, but the angle is bad. I’m bent sideways, have to use my left hand, am terrified of slipping, or dropping the knife, can’t get good leverage. There’s a vicious ache in my side, somewhere between my kidney and the top of my hip. Plus I’m looking down at Mom, and at the pretty, sugar-dusted gravel just beneath her, and part of my brain knows that the pretty, sugary gravel is in fact a field of snow-covered boulders a mile away.

  A body is a body.

  Not complicated.

  Without consciousness—

  I hack and saw for two, three minutes, gasping. I badly rip a thumbnail when it catches on the rock. Three-quarters of the way through now, but obstinate strands refuse to give.

  “Come on, you bastard,” I shout. It doesn’t help that I can’t see clearly because scalding salt tears are erupting out of my eyes. I wipe at them with the back of my hand, then reach down again.

  At last, with one last pull on the knife, I feel the tension go. And hang there, mesmerized.

  She’s not facing me—that would be worse; her head is canted over to one side, as if she’s lazily admiring the view. And it doesn’t look like she’s falling. Instead she appears to shrink, faster and faster: to the size of a child, a doll, an insect.

  It’s only seconds from there to the vanishing point. When my eyes are no longer sure whether they can pick out the evaporating dot of yellow from the background, I turn away, pressing my face into the cold surface of the rock, willing my mind to empty. Even if I can’t see the moment of impact, I don’t want to be looking.

  There’s a pathetically narrow ledge not far from our night’s bivouac. It takes most of a precarious, exhausting hour to get Rosko back to it, and he screams every time I move him. At one point I slip, and it scares me so badly that I have to stop for perhaps a full minute, hanging on and breathing deep, just to avoid throwing up all over both of us. A few moves later it happens again; this time I fall, and for a split second I know for certain that we’re both going to die. Instead, somehow, I whirl my left wrist around the slithering rope and jam my scrabbling right foot onto a small protruding knob. I jar my knee so badly that it feels like someone has driven a chisel into the joint, and at first I think I’ve torn the ligaments beyond use. Once I get a foothold on the other side, I tell myself to stop again, hold still, and take five deep breaths—but at breath number three my left leg, taking all the weight, begins to jackhammer and fail.

  Out of the corner of my eye I see, like a half glass of water in the desert, an old metal piton sticking out of the rock, evidence that some long-gone climber did at least cross this route. Hail Mary—last chance. I lunge wildly at it, not expecting that I can even reach, but I manage to wrap my index and middle fingers around it. As I haul upward, the corroded metal slices through my glove and takes my middle finger down to the bone. Funny, almost: this pain feels like fire, like my whole arm is ablaze. A second later, blood starts to leak out of the glove at the wrist and splatter down into my eyes.

  The sensation is like a dentist ramming a high-speed drill into raw nerve. But I know that if I think about it, give in to it, I’ll fall. Somehow I clamber back up. When I secure myself enough to ease off the glove, I’m shaking so much that the sticky mass of fabric jumps from my grip like an injured crab and tumbles away into space.

  Slow, agonizing progress after that. I talk, shout, yell to all the parts of my body that are variously in pain, or going numb, telling them to just shut up and work goddammit work and I’ll look after you later. I’m breathing so hard, sucking in so hungrily, that the freezing air feels like a blowtorch in my throat. When we get to the ledge, I work at an intense, feverish pace to secure Rosko to the rock, and despite the cold, there’s sweat pouring off me.

  At last I hoist myself up next to his side, remove and secure my pack. We’re safe—sort of. I’m carrying a lightweight emergency sleeping bag, but there’s no way I can get him into it, and who knows how much more damage I’ll do to him if I try. So I secure him some more, bunch the bag around him, and stuff him with as much oxycodone as I dare. Then I find some gauze in the first aid bag, wrap it around my frozen, gore-encrusted hand.

  My mind is so full—so empty? I don’t even know which it is—that I almost don’t notice the VHF radio on his belt. Then it dawns on me: Mom had one, and he had the spare, but the spare is switched off to save batteries. I turn it on, and nearly drop it when it immediately crackles in my hand.

  “Daniel? Are you all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you answer?” Stefan’s voice seems to come from far away, as if English is a language that I once knew but have forgotten. It’s difficult to construct a reply.

  “I did answer. I didn’t. Not. It was a. It was because. Because—”

  I stop talking, take those two neglected deep breaths, decide not to explain that I’ve been too busy for the concept of a radio to even occur to me.

  “What’s your status?”

  “Mom’s dead. Rosko’s badly injured.”

  “What about you?”

  A moment seven years ago in Crete comes back to me.

  “I’m fine.”

  “OK, good. You’ve got to hang on. The rock just missed Édouard and Sophie, and they’re heading across to you now, but it’s going to take a long time. The rockfall opened up a big fissure between their position and yours, with lots of loose stuff. They may have to go down a long way and then back up.”

  The cold is savage and terrible, won’t leave me alone. The pain in my damaged knee and hand is like an earsplitting two-tone siren that I can’t turn off. I think: How will I endure this? And yet I don’t have to. Mercifully, after a period of time that might be five minutes or an hour, these bodily sensations begin to recede, my mind begins to empty. There’s a change in the quality of my fear too, or at least my attitude to the fear: it’s like I’m moving outside of it, holding it in my hands, examining it instead of experiencing it.

  Is this what death feels like? If so, it’s not so bad.

  I let the fear go. What’s left inside my head is a kind of miniature theater, all white, with random experiences passing across it like moths:

  It’s summer. I’m five years old, and Mom is lifting a bucket of blackberries toward me at an old farm on the Skagit River.

  On that first trip to Crete, we’re sitting outside at a village restaurant, and Dad is showing off his Greek for the benefit of the owner. The exact flavor and texture of a chunk of oily white fish are inextricably linked with the sound of a motorcycle in the distance an
d the sight of the golden oil as it slides and glistens on a pale blue plate.

  Mom is at the wheel of Maiandros, in orange storm gear, somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. She catches my eye, flashes her brilliant smile, and as we crash through a wave she hoots—Wooh!—framed by a rainbow of spray.

  Kit Cerenkov is lying on the floor of my room, in running gear, doing leg lifts and complaining about her math homework. I’m sitting in the window seat, trying not to look at her, because seeing her thigh muscles flex completely short-circuits my ability to focus on what she’s saying, which probably means I’m just a testosterone-driven Neanderthal who doesn’t deserve her anyway.

  I’m brought back to the present by the fizzing squawk of the radio. Stefan checking in. My hands are almost completely numb from the wrists down, might as well be fakes made from rubber; it takes me a minute to figure out how to press the “Talk” button on the VHF.

  “Sorry, Stefan, cold making me clumsy.”

  “Are you well secured?”

  By any ordinary standard, Stefan, you bet your ass.

  I have no recollection of doing it, none, but a brief inspection shows that I tied us into four separate support points and doubled all the knots. It still doesn’t feel like enough. I’ve never felt so exposed on a climb as I do now, so aware of the yawning empty space below us, so aware of gravity’s insatiable appetite.

  I try to reassure him about Rosko, but I keep it short, both because I’m having trouble with words and because basically I’m lying. Rosko is completely unresponsive again, breathing raggedly, icy to the touch, and his helmet is cracked down the middle like an egg. I don’t need medical training to see that he should be in a hospital operating theater, right now.

  “I think he’ll be OK,” I say feebly. “I think he’ll be OK.”

  Reluctantly, and with great difficulty, I take off my own climbing jacket and wrap that around him too. Then I stuff my useless hands into my armpits, huddle into a ball to preserve some warmth, and although the wind is like knives in my back, I’m soon drifting again.